Sunday, 17 December 2006

One of the reasons why I keep a Windows laptop used to be that the HSBC online business banking site required Internet Explorer or an antiquated version of Netscape so I couldn't use it on my Mac. They recently changed their authentication mechanism and out of curiosity I tried it again with Firefox today. It works perfectly both on Windows and OS-X. So that's now one less reason to keep the Windows laptop. Thank you HSBC.

Friday, 8 December 2006

For people who have been used to MVC frameworks such as Struts or Ruby on Rails, PHP can be very frustrating: a typical PHP page looks like tag soup that mixes business logic, presentation and database access. And there is no escaping PHP: this is the one technology that all ISP offer and a vast majority don't offer anything else. So up to know it was a case of setting up your own server to use your preferred technology or deal with tag soup.

So stumbling upon the Zend Framework today felt like a revelation! and what's even better, you can download an excellent tutorial from Rob Allen's weblog. The Zend Framework is still at an early stage of development but it looks extremely promising. If you use PHP, you have to try it out.